Contributed by Michael Brennan / If you are interested in the ongoing relevance or advancement of landscape, Ron Milewicz’s current exhibition “Second Sight” at Elizabeth Harris Gallery is for you.
Milewicz, who has taught for decades, is an expert hand at drawing, painting, and, most importantly, seeing. He has developed a synthetic, visionary style that is more revealing of nature than rote realism. His landscapes, all very finely painted, embody a kind of wisdom that comes from years of study and deeply internalized consideration. His lines are as finely woven as the strands of flax in the linen on which he sometimes paints. Milewicz has a particular gift for threading light and atmosphere together. His revelatory fusion approaches Charles E. Burchfield’s, though it is quieter and less phantasmagoric.
Milewicz’s complex line often produces masses reminiscent of Seurat’s drawings, dense yet atmospheric.
French connections aside, it’s hard not to read an idealized America into Milewicz’s paintings. He works upstate, in the lower Hudson Valley, near Gallatin, NY, well east of the “burned-over district.” Yet his woods are slightly haunted, inhabited by observation, perhaps. They seem to have a kind of spiritual persona, as in the transcendentalist literature of the American Renaissance – especially in the works of Cooper, Hawthorne, Melville, and Poe – though Milewicz’s forests are not menacing. Milewicz achieves this effect through deft control of value: a painstaking adjustment of lights and darks.
He has a keen sense and a fine command of color, too, blazing full-on and demonstrated nicely in Sunlit.
Milewicz’s work is intimate, most of his paintings less than a foot tall. They reward face-to-face engagement, like peering expectantly through the slot of a speakeasy door.
Many artists have taken on the task of making landscape meaningful and vital in the twenty-first century. Few have achieved it. Ron Milewicz is a shining exception. His paintings, in their tempered splendor, fondly recall, contextualize, and update the Thoreauvian sensibility without sentimentalizing it.
“Ron Milewicz, Second Sight,” Elizabeth Harris Gallery, 529 West 20th Street. Through May 25, 2024.
About the author: Michael Brennan is a Brooklyn based abstract painter who writes on art.
sublime show, so glad to get to know this work
immediately related these paintings to Burchfield
Quiet, misty paintings – quite beautiful.
Beautiful work. We own a small, intimate painting of construction cranes by Mr. Milewicz. Love the impressionistic direction his painting has taken; very tender and emotionally sincere.